Sombrilla

The University of Texas at San Antonio Online Magazine

It was a sticky July morning
in front of the Convocation Center on UTSA's Main Campus when head football Coach Larry
Coker suddenly morphed into the Roadrunners' head cheerleader.
"Are we ready?" Coker demanded
loudly, like a general before the battle. "Are we ready for football?
"BIRDS UP!"
The
30 or 40 people gathered around—administrators, faculty, students and staff about to depart
for a tour of football facilities at the Alamodome—obediently extended their arms and flashed
the Roadrunners' hand sign.
"Now here's the hard part," Coker teased. "I yell U-T and you yell
S-A. Ready?"
U-T! S-A! U-T! S-A! U-T! S-A!
The raucous cheer echoed through the Sombrilla,
bounced off the Alamo and wrapped itself around the city of San Antonio.Football. It's here.

Photo above by Mark McClendon...

Photos by Mark Sobhani...

Football and college life are as interconnected as blood
and bone in the American mind. College memories, for
many, revolve as much or more around gridiron battles on
idyllic autumn afternoons as they do on chemistry labs
and English 101.

But football was never inevitable at UTSA, despite the university's
being located in a football-loving region of a footballcrazy
state. As one administrator said, UTSA was created in
1969 to be an inexpensive alternative for students who wanted
a good education but couldn't afford or qualify for other Texas
schools. The keep-costs-down, no-frills approach meant the university
had to remain a commuter campus with no dorms and
few student activities, especially expensive ones like football.

In 1999, UTSA got a new president, Ricardo Romo, and
a new athletics director, Lynn Hickey. At the time, neither
thought football was feasible.

"It's kind of hard to rally around a math class."

Bear Bryant, the late University of Alabama
head coach, explaining the need for college football

"Football was still the 'F' word back then," said Brad
Parrott, senior associate director of athletics.

But after a year or so, Parrott added, attitudes began to change.
Words and phrases such as "Tier One," "research intensive" and
"school of first choice" were heard around campus. More and
more, administrators and community leaders began to feel that
moving UTSA forward would require a more traditional college
experience. And that, among other things, meant football.

"After being here a while," Hickey said, "and understanding
the needs not only of this campus but of this community
and all of South Texas, for us not to go forward would have
been the wrong thing."

Quietly, Hickey and Parrott began laying the groundwork
for Roadrunners football. They traveled the state visiting other
programs as well as athletic conference officials, learning
what it would take to field a team. And, to be in Title IX, or
gender equality, compliance should football become a reality,
the school added women's golf in 2004 and women's
soccer in 2006.

The push for San Antonio football picked up steam in the
aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Because of damage
to the Superdome, the NFL's New Orleans Saints set up practice
facilities and offices in San Antonio and played some of
their home games in the Alamodome.

Behind the scenes, city officials and community leaders
lobbied hard to get the Saints to relocate permanently to San
Antonio. When those efforts fell through, attention shifted
hard to UTSA.

Why couldn't UTSA be San Antonio's team?

UTSA football players have been using Northside Independent School
District's Dub Farris Stadium for practices.
The first practice was held in September.

Hickey also set up an athletics advisory board of alumni
and business leaders, and football was a constant topic.

"We talked for a long time about the long-term goal of football,
what was the right time," said Jim Mickey '78, a member of
the committee and UTSA's associate vice president for alumni
programs and marketing. "The timing had to be right."

Hickey agreed. Crucially, so did Romo.

Even though he's "among the most avid fans of college
football," Romo said, "I wanted to make certain that we
added a football program at UTSA only when the time was
right and we could pay for it. My priorities have always been
focused on building a first-class research university that provides
students access to a complete university experience."

Romo, said Hickey, "did an outstanding job kind of holding
us back until all the pieces were in place."

The concept of UTSA football got a boost with the release of
a feasibility study in November 2006. The report by Carr Sports
Associates in Gainesville, Fla., outlined the steps UTSA needed
to take to implement football. High on the list was fundraising.

In 2007, the idea of football picked up steam. In November,
at the dedication ceremony of the Biotechnology, Sciences
and Engineering Building, Romo unveiled UTSA's strategic
plan, "A Shared Vision: UTSA 2016." Meant to propel the university
toward national research university status, it was one of
the academic pieces Romo wanted to have in place before
football was added.

Just two months earlier, UTSA students had overwhelmingly
approved a referendum supporting the expansion of
the athletics program and doubling the athletics fee.
The vote was key for Romo. "I decided it was the time to
move forward," he recalled.

A little more than a year later, in December 2008, the University
of Texas System Board of Regents gave the go-ahead.
The plan not only approved football, but also called for the
building of an $84 million athletics complex, dubbed Park
West, for football practice facilities and stadiums for soccer,
track and field, baseball, softball and tennis. Football games
would be played in the Alamodome.

In the pipeline at the time was $22 million in bond
money approved by Bexar County and City of San Antonio
voters, all for facilities. And UTSA launched a five-year, $15
million drive to support operations.

With momentum on UTSA's side, Hickey wasted no time beginning
a national search for a football coach. She found one.

March 6, 2009, the anniversary of the day the Alamo fell,
was the highest point yet for UTSA football. The school had
snagged one of the best-known names in the game, Larry
Coker, as its first head coach, and he was being introduced to
a cheering crowd in the University Center.

"That place was rocking," recalled Mickey, adding that
he'd never seen anything like it on the UTSA campus. "It was
national news."

After all, Coker, an Oklahoma native, had guided the Miami
Hurricanes to the 2001 national championship while
earning national Coach of the Year honors. He'd compiled
a phenomenal 60–15 record. He'd been out of coaching for
three years, working as an analyst for ESPN, and was eager to
return, drawn to the challenges and potential at UTSA and
the chance to leave a legacy.

"We went from a program with dreams and aspirations
to instant credibility when we hired Coker," Mickey said. "We
could never have done better."

The new coach embarked on a whirlwind schedule while
changing hats daily. One day he was a fundraiser, the next a
PR man, fanning dreams and recruiting fans as much as players.

If there was any doubt he was building from scratch, his
surroundings on campus drove home the point. The football
staff is housed in a nondescript modular building. No sign
announces their presence. The flurry of activity inside, for the
most part, goes unnoticed.

Setting a culture

Seated in his office last summer, Coker looked
relaxed and confident in khakis and a blue UTSA polo shirt.
Out front, a digital clock is counting down the days, minutes
and seconds until the first game's kickoff in the Alamodome,
Sept. 3, 2011. The contest will be against Northeastern (Oklahoma)
State University, which happens to be Coker's alma mater.

"I don't think that's a coincidence," he said, smiling.

"This isn't going to happen overnight...but we're in the
process of having a good product...We're going to build it the right way [academically]."

Larry Coker, head Football Coach

Asked about his day, Coker said he'd already spent time setting
up study halls and academic counseling for his new players,
had a lunch with community leaders and met with his coaches.

"We're setting a culture here," he said. "There are no older
players. We're in the process of building this program. We're
going to build it the right way [academically]."

His enthusiasm moved to a higher level when he glanced
down at his playbook.

"It's going to be a multiple offense," he said. "We're gonna have
a lot of spread-type things but also a lot of power offense, too.

"I expect us to be better than what people think we're
going to be."

But, as he's done since the day he was hired, Coker immediately
sounded a note of caution. "This isn't going to happen
overnight. We're not Texas or the University of Oklahoma or
the Dallas Cowboys. And you're not going to see that from
Day One. But we're in the process of having a good product."

Questions and models

A football team, for a university, is far more
than X's and O's, blocking and tackling. It's the focus of
student spirit and pride. It's part of that traditional college
experience administrators talk about.

In June 2010, a committee representing various university
constituencies and chaired by John Kaulfus, associate dean
of students, began looking at game day and homecoming
activities at other universities. The question: How will UTSA
make football most relevant and exciting for students?

From top: Referees prepare to officiate a scrimmage at
Dub Farris Stadium; Coach Larry Coker encourages players
after scrimmage; a player's reaction shows that football
is as much a mental game as a physical one.

Kaulfus' committee began discussing options and researching
traditions and logistics at other schools, particularly
those that play their games off campus, as UTSA will.

"I don't believe in reinventing the wheel," he said. "There
are a lot of questions. How do they get students to the venue?
How do they handle security? How do they handle student
misconduct? As everyone knows, the Alamodome is going
to sell beer [at games]. How are we going to approach it?"

One university that UTSA immediately identified as a
model—both for game day activities and the football program
itself—was the University of South Florida in Tampa.

"South Florida went through what we're going through 15
years ago," Hickey said. "They're in a good-sized city, Tampa. Demographically,
the make-up of the campus is very similar—a
majority minority campus. And they added football and then
made the move from [Football Championship Subdivision]
to [Football Bowl Subdivision] very quickly. They don't have
a facility on campus. They play in the Tampa Bay Buccaneers'
stadium. There are just a tremendous number of parallels."

Romo, Hickey, Coker and others visited South Florida to
listen and learn. University officials also have made football
fact-finding trips to Florida Atlantic, Florida International,
Central Florida, Old Dominion, Georgia State, Colorado State,
Houston and other universities.

Kaulfus said that even though UTSA games will be played
downtown, "we still want to do things on campus, such as the
pep rallies, that will involve the on-campus community."

Exactly what the homecoming activities will be is unknown,
but homecoming will definitely move from spring to
fall. There will be two homecomings in 2011, he said.

What is certain is the constant buzz around campus.

"You hear it all over campus. 'When's football starting?
When's football starting?' " said Kaitlin McGaughey, a junior
double major in information systems and infrastructure assurance
and a member of the Kaulfus committee. "Everyone's
pumped up and it's like, why can't it be fall of 2011 right
now? Because I want to go to a game! I want to go tailgating!"

McGaughey, also the president of the Panhellenic Council,
the governing body for all UTSA sororities, keeps the schedule
in her car so she can count down the days to the first game.

Perhaps reflecting the mythic role football plays in college
life and American culture, McGaughey said she understands
other sports, but "I KNOW football."

And she knows what she and her sorority sisters will be
doing Sept. 3.

"We're going to scream our heads off."

Opening doors

It's no secret that at some universities sports
and academics are seen as competitors, both for attention and
for dollars. And football players at some schools are dubbed
mini-professionals who can hardly be called students.

UTSA officials insist those things won't happen here.

"We have to keep everything in perspective as we're building
this program," Hickey said. "The student-athletes are here
to get a degree. The university is here to educate students."

Football, she said, will open doors for UTSA that otherwise
stay locked.

"We're that community engagement piece. …But to put
the pressure on an academic department to go out and
try to have the same visibility that we're creating right now
with football, and then therefore they're going to bring all
this funding in for everybody else, it's not the way our culture
works. I'm not saying that's right, but that's how it is."

John Frederick, UTSA's provost and vice president for
academic affairs, said football "will contribute to the general
school spirit and campus community environment that's essential
to Tier One."

And it will be a rallying point for the wider community as
well, he added, which usually translates into support for both
athletics and academics.

"Everyone's pumped up and it's like, why can't it be fall of 2011 right now?"

While some faculty may be skeptical, Frederick said, he's
"heard more supportive comments than anything."

Romo said the university is already benefiting from football
even before the first snap.

"The excitement right now in the community regarding
UTSA is contagious, and football has helped fuel that excitement,"
he said.

He pointed out that in 2009, eight percent of entering
freshmen graduated in the top 10 percent of their class. This
fall that number increased to 11 percent. One of the reasons,
he said, is football, because it enriches campus life and the
college experience.

Frederick agreed. "The kind of students we're trying to attract,"
he said, "value the kind of environment that includes athletics."

Reveries

This is clearly the season of dreams for UTSA
football. And there are no small dreams.

Players and coaches are dreaming of touchdowns and
blitzes, long passes and a punishing ground game.